My personal take on what's going on within our Event Horizon. Mostly astronomical, often cosmological, usually quite grumpy.

Thursday, 6 December 2012

Alert: you may be living in a simulated universe

Today is a busy day, with the allocation of supercomputer time though ASTAC and the announcement of the 2012 Excellence in Research for Australia, which always leads to robust "discussion", and board of examiners meetings. So, only time for a quick post.

There's another one which is even more appropriate, but I can't find it now.

Consider the following: Arguments for our being inside a simulation are based on something like Moore's law and thus the conclusion that there should be many more civilizations than actual worlds, so it is likely that we are simulated. However, this assumes the laws of our universe. If our universe is in fact simulated, then it might have completely different laws to the real universe in which it is embedded, for which these assumptions might not hold.

In other words, once one allows that it is possible that we are simulated, one cannot draw any conclusions about the probability of this situation.